One challenge with most stylistic and textlinguistic approaches to literary structure in biblical prose has been the lack of formal criteria for discerning text hierarchy and embedding at the macro-level. While stylistic analysis draws attention to the literary artistry of the biblical text as a whole, its conclusions too often fail to account for formal structuring features in the text that were apparently intended to help guide a reader's understanding of discourse organization and flow-of-thought. Similarly, while textlinguistics has shown the fruitfulness of identifying mainline and offline predication patterns within a given text type in order to distinguish features like paragraph divisions and background material, little work has been done to clarify how macro-structure is to be discerned in texts like the reported speech of Deuteronomy where numerous discourse types are strung together within a single address. This study argues that the first step in analyzing text hierarchy and macrostructure is to observe how wa and asyndeton (Ø) shape discourse blocks. The connector wa creates a coordinated chain of clauses that are to be read together, whereas Ø breaks the chain, either to start a completely new unit or to signal an embedded (appositional or parenthetical) unit within the higher unit of discourse. Having established the primary and supportive units on the basis of these two formal features, the interpreter can then analyze each text block for shifts in predication patterns to distinguish smaller paragraph divisions and inner-paragraph comments.